In 2018, ADL Center for Technology and Society (CTS), with the support of the Robert Belfer Family, launched the Belfer Fellows program. This fourth class of Belfer fellows includes two outstanding individuals that will develop projects with CTS to study generative AI and other emerging technologies. The Belfer Fellowship program advances ADL’s work by supporting groundbreaking research into online hate and harassment and implementing these projects to fight for just, equitable online spaces.
The 2022 fellows are:
Dr. Kathleen Searles
Dr. Kathleen Searles is the Sheldon Beychok Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Communication at Louisiana State University. Her project tests the efficacy of online bystander interventions for journalists who have been targeted by online hate and harassment campaigns. Dr. Searles has published over 30 articles and book chapters on political psychology, political communication and behavior. She also has two forthcoming co-authored books and she has been awarded more than seven million dollars in grant monies, including four National Science Foundation grants. In addition to her academic work, she is also the co-PI of Expert Voices Together, a team working to address the online abuse of experts and journalists, and a founding member and executive emerita of Women Also Know Stuff, an organization designed to decrease the gender imbalance in media representation of experts. She is a co-convener of the Election Coverage and Democracy Network, which works with journalists to cover electoral politics.
Dr. Erik Bucy & Dr. Dhavan Shah
Dr. Erik Bucy is the Marshall and Sharleen Formby Regents Professor of Strategic Communication in the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University, where he teaches and conducts research on disinformation, visual politics, nonverbal communication, new technology topics, and public opinion about the press. Bucy is the author of the award-winning Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (with Maria Elizabeth Grabe, Oxford 2009) and editor of the Sourcebook for Political Communication Research (with R. Lance Holbert, Routledge 2013). In 2021, Bucy was recognized by Stanford University as one of the 100,000 most-cited scientific researchers in the world by discipline. He is currently an honorary fellow of the Mass Communication Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Dr. Dhavan Shah is the Louis A. & Mary E. Maier-Bascom Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also the director of the Mass Communication Research Center (MCRC), Research Director of the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal (CCCR), and Scientific Director in the Center for Health Enhancement System Studies (CHESS). His research focuses on the influence of electronic and digital media on social judgments, civic engagement, and health support. He has authored over 140 peer-reviewed articles and 20 chapters, and his research has earned over $45.2 million in funding from organizations and foundations like the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Drug Abuse, Ford, and others.
Dr. Bucy and Dr. Shah’s project detects and documents the prevalence of visual hate symbols on major news sites and social media platforms that surface around racialized news events, protests, and demonstrations. Their project will result in a multi-modal machine classifier of hate symbols and images.
The Belfer Fellowship program is possible due to the continued generosity of the Robert Belfer Family.
ADL Center for Technology and Society will work with the new fellows as they pursue research in previously unexplored areas. The fellows will also augment ADL’s ongoing research efforts to help quantify and qualify online hate in a variety of social media sites, gaming platforms and other online communities. As ADL continues to work on multiple fronts to make the online space less hateful, the fellows’ research will expand upon this expertise and activity.